Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
The Baltic Contingent
At noon on May 29, a rainy blustery day, General Pershing and fiftynine officers, sixtyseven enlisted men and thirtysix field clerks, accompanied by five civilian interpreters and two newspaper correspondents, embarked on a ferryboat from Governor’s Island and headed through the Narrows into Gravesend Bay. There, after tossing around for some hours in a choppy sea, they were picked up by the White Star liner Baltic.
Although submarines and death by drowning were on every man’s mind, the trip was uneventful. The officers attended French classes, and were lectured on the problems of maintaining an army in France by various British authorities on board. Their medical men vaccinated them and shot them full of injections against typhoid and paratyphoid A and B. On the tenth day the Baltic zigzagged into the Mersey.
Pershing’s plan had been to slip through England and to set up his headquarters in France as secretly as possible, but a fulldress military welcome awaited the little detachment when the Baltic warped into the Liverpool dock. There was a British admiral, a lieutenant general, a delegation from the Imperial General Staff, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and the Royal Welsh Fusileers with its band drawn up at attention to meet them, complete with the regimental mascot, a stately old white billygoat. In the background was a swarm of newspapermen and photographers. British propaganda was evidently blowing up the arrival of American troops for all it was worth. Stiff as ramrods, with polished puttees and uniforms pressed to the nines, the American officers marched down the gangplank to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
They were conveyed to London on a Royal train. The officers were put up at the Savoy as guests of the nation and the enlistedmen housed among the Beefeaters in the Tower. The general and his staff were received at Buckingham Palace. They attended services at Westminster Abbey. They were greeted by Lloyd George and wined and dined at the War Office. After a dizzy round of receptions, luncheons and state dinners, they found themselves one dewy June morning boarding the channel boat for France.
“At Boulogne wharf,” Major Harbord wrote in his diary, “a drove of French officers, a few Britishers (for Boulogne is a British debarkation port), scores of newspaper men, and a regiment of French soldiers with their funny little steel helmets, and whiskers of various types …” The band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Americans stood at attention “for several days,” it seemed to Major Harbord, “while they played it over and over. Even the General who stands like a statue growled at the number of times they played it.” Next came the “Marseillaise,” “and then, our hands having broken off at the wrist, we stood up to the gangway while a dozen fuzzy little Frenchmen came up. Each saluted the General and made a little speech and then sidestepped and was replaced by another until each little man had made his speech.”
The last was a French brigadier with a sweeping mustache that hid great scars on his chin. His right arm was gone below the elbow. This was General Pelletier, who, having lived two years in San Francisco, was detailed, on account of his knowledge of English, to Pershing’s staff.
“He is a brave, simpleminded, gallant old fellow,” noted Harbord, “now rapidly becoming an embarrassment to us, his rank having to be constantly considered … He has a bunch of attachés, for, like the British cousins, many French officers are keen to serve with the Americans. A Lieutenant Colonel Comte de Chambrun, great grandson of Lafayette, and husband of Nicholas Longworth’s sister, is one of them. He is an artilleryman and speaks good English, and a great deal of it.”
Though eager to reach Paris and go to work, Pershing and his little group were detained in Boulogne all morning. As a matter of course they were taken to visit the ancient castle on the hill. In Europe the past was still present. At every pause somebody made a speech about it. Like good Americans most of them had never given a thought to history. Now they found the word historique ringing in their ears. They were returning, a hundred and forty years later, the visit of Rochambeau and Lafayette. Their arrival was un moment historique.
They finally discovered the reason for the delay. Their train was being held so that they could make their entry into Paris after working hours, when the streets would surely be crowded. The French, too, were out to squeeze every bit of propaganda value out of the arrival of Pershing’s tiny detachment. Pétain had been telling his troops: we must wait for the Americans. The Americans were here.
Worn out with oratory the general closed himself in his compartment for a nap while the members of his staff sat, in the unfamiliar compartments with their crocheted headrests, jiggling with the rhythm of the rails, looking out of the grubby train windows at the gray skies, the great stone walls, the thatched and slate roofs, the lacy steeples, the ancient towers encrusted with lichen and moss, and the green fields, the carefully tilled gardenplots, the parklike hills of northern France. Red poppies bloomed everywhere. It seemed a picturebook world, with only an occasional string of brown British lorries, or field guns on the move, or a staffcar cruising along poplarlined stone roads to give a hint of war.
As they drove out of the Gare du Nord, after endless delays while the French protocol officers decided who would ride with whom in which car or carriage, they were met by a storm of cheers.
“The acclaim that greeted us,” wrote Pershing, “as we drove through the streets en route to the hotel was to me a complete surprise. Dense masses of people lined the boulevards and squares. It was said that never before in the history of Paris had there been such an outpouring of people. Men, women and children absolutely packed every foot of space, even to the windows and housetops. Cheers and tears were mingled together and shouts of enthusiasm fairly rent the air. Women climbed into our automobiles screaming ‘Vive l’Amerique,’ and threw flowers till we were literally buried. Everybody waved flags and banners. At several points the masses surged into the streets, entirely beyond control of the police.”
When they arrived at the Hôtel de Crillon, General Pershing was forced to appear again and again on his balcony to salute the enormous crowds massed in the Place de la Concorde. He let himself be carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment to the point of endeavoring to address the French Journalists, crowding into the lobby of his suite, in their own language. The journalists had trouble hiding their smiles behind their notebooks. “After a sentence or two I concluded in my mother tongue,” noted the general. Pershing’s French became a byword among the irreverent.
He was putting himself out, sometimes awkwardly because it went against the grain, to make a good impression on the French public; as when, at his chief of staff’s suggestion, he spoiled a new pair of gloves by shaking hands, for the benefit of the photographers, with the engineer and the fireman of the train which had brought him into Paris. But he was determined not to be taken in, no, not by anybody.
“I guess our man will hold his own,” noted Harbord, just after seeing him off on a visit to the front with General Pétain and Minister of War Paul Painlevé, who were repeating the arguments Joffre had used in Washington to induce him to send in American units as replacements into French divisions. “He knows the probable attempt in advance and he has his teeth set.”
The General Organization Project
General Pershing’s first care, on arriving in Paris, was to find quarters where he could put his outfit to work. Two dwelling houses were rented on the rue Constantine opposite the vast buildings of the Invalides, where Foch had his niche as chief of the French general staff; and the fusty old rooms were fitted up as improvised offices. There the field clerks were installed at their desks. Benches were dragged into the halls for the enlistedmen who were to serve as orderlies and messengers and guards. Cubbyholes were partitioned off for the colonels and majors and captains and lesser fry on whom would fall the detailed work of inventing an army, a staff system, and supply services capable of conducting a campaign four thousand miles from the home base. It was an operation without precedent in the annals of war.
For his own quarters Pershin
In spite of a punishing calendar of official calls: on the President of the Republic, and on Marshal Joffre, and on General Foch, and on a long list of generals whose stars were rising or falling in response to the complicated manoeuvres of French military politics; and on Pétain, whom all described as the man of the hour; and dinners to attend and luncheons and toasts to be responded to, and gala performances at the Opèra and the Opèra Comique and the Comèdie Française, and interallied concerts at the Trocadèro which the American officers had at least to appear to enjoy; and troops to review and field headquarters and picked spots on the front to visit, Pershing and his assistants went to work with extraordinary dispatch to draw up the scheme for an American expeditionary force.
Pershing knew it was up to him. The War Department had made no preparations. The officers at the War College had been trying to work up a sketchy sort of plan for the supply of troops abroad during the winter, but General Tasker Bliss, alternating as Chief of Staff with the old Indian negotiator Hugh Scott, who was more interested in Indian sign languages than in administrative problems had, the day before Pershing sailed on the Baltic, written on the War College memorandum: “General Pershing’s expedition is being sent abroad on the urgent insistence of Marshal Joffre and the French mission that a force, however small, be sent to produce a moral effect … Our General Staff has made no plan (so far as known to the Secretary of War) for prompt dispatch of reinforcements to General Pershing, nor the prompt dispatch of considerable forces to France … What the French General Staff is now concerned about is the establishment of an important base and line of communication for a much larger force than General Pershing will have. They evidently think that having yielded to the demand for a small force for moral effect, it is quite soon to be followed by a large force for physical effect. Thus far we have no plans for this.”
During his first days in France Pershing learned that he would have to deal not only with procrastination in Washington but with deepseated, if tactfully expressed, opposition among the French and British commands. The French and British wanted American recruits to use—as the British were using the Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders, and as the French were using their colonial troops—to ease the drain on their own manpower in fighting a war of attrition.
If Pershing had been a more imaginative man he would have been appalled by the difficulties of his position. Being a man of single mind he managed to ignore the pressures and embarrassments and hindrances that lurked under the torrents of fair words with which the Allied authorities greeted him on every hand. This was his opportunity to realize the ambitions which had been instilled in him when he entered West Point as a raw young rural schoolteacher without a prospect in the world. His orders were to lead an American Army against the Germans and he intended to carry them out to the letter.
Le Bassin de la Briey
His first business was to pick an objective. Where could an American army be used most effectively “to carry on the war,” in the terms of Secretary Baker’s orders, “vigorously … and towards a victorious conclusion”?
Except for small French and Belgian forces defending the fraction of Belgian soil left free from German occupation, the British under Haig held an entrenched line that stretched south from the channel coast to St. Quentin. Their General Plumer had, early in June, managed somewhat to offset Nivelle’s defeat on the Aisne by a successful mining operation, through which he captured the high ground the Germans held in front of the Flemish village of Messines. Messines was to the right of Ypres, where Haig, on whose patient shoulders the whole weight of holding the Germans back now rested, was planning great efforts for later in the summer. Since the fizzle of the Nivelle plan there had been no further effort to unify the French and British commands.
From St. Quentin east the French armies, riddled by defeatism and mutiny, had tenuous hold—how tenuous the Germans, fortunately for the Allies, did not know—on the trenches and fortifications leading through Soissons to Rheims and Verdun, and on past Nancy to the Swiss border.
It didn’t take Pershing long to discover from his talks with Pétain that the French had no offensive plans on a large scale whatsoever. The most Pétain hoped for was to restore morale to the point of undertaking a local attack of limited risk in the Verdun sector.
Searching the map with fresh eyes Pershing found what he hoped might turn out to be a weak spot in the German position. That was the salient east of Verdun that thrust deep into French territory with its apex at St. Mihiel. Behind that salient was the old French fortress of Metz in Lorraine, which the Germans held as part of their spoil from the Franco-Prussian War.
To the northwest of Metz was a region known as the Bassin de la Briey where the iron ore was mined upon which the Germans depended for a great part of their steel production. To the northeast was the Saar valley which furnished most of their coal. The railroad lines that linked the sources of German raw materials ran roughly east and west An Allied breakthrough into the Bassin de la Briey would deal German industry a fatal blow. From the moment that General Pershing circled the St. Mihiel salient with his pencil on the map the course of the American campaign in France was decided.
Other considerations entered into the choice of the Lorraine front. It was the only region where lines of supply could be established independent of the French communications which all centered on Paris, and of the British, which radiated out from the channel ports. Accordingly Pershing arranged with the French to set up American ports of entry at St. Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, at La Pallice a little further south on the Bay of Biscay; and at Bassens, across the Garonne river from Bordeaux in the estuary of the Gironde. American money would have to be spent and American labor imported to improve docking and warehousing facilities and to modernize the railroad line which ran up from St. Nazaire and La Pallice to Tours and thence crossed south of Paris in an easterly direction to Chaumont and Neufchâteau, which were small towns near enough the front to furnish staging areas. Another line would feed into the American sector from Bassens and Bordeaux through Issoudun and Bourges. If the need should arise a third route could be utilized up from Marseilles, France’s principal Mediterranean port, through Lyon and Dijon.
“The low morale and worn condition of the Allied armies,” wrote Pershing in the final summing up of his plans, “suggested that they might be unable to protect their communications, and therefore it was essential that we should have our own independent system.”
On June 28 General Pershing went down to St. Nazaire to meet the advance guard of his 1st Division. To everybody’s amazement, the fourteen merchantmen converted to troop transports slipped past the U-boats without a casualty. At lunch aboard the flagship Seattle, Admiral Gleaves, who commanded the convoying cruisers and destroyers, could only attribute their safe arrival to the hand of Providence.
The Yanks Are Coming
The general, who had been lecturing all and sundry on the need for strict censorship of the news of military movements, was considerably put out by finding detailed descriptions of the landing of the American troops, including names of units and numbers of men, in the British and French newspapers next morning.
He was further disturbed by his inspection of the port facilities at St. Nazaire. Though they were reputed to be among the best in Europe, Pershing found the docks archaic. There was no warehouse space. Each freightcar shunting out from the loading area had to be turned by hand on a turntable. Neither the longshoremen nor the railroad workers nor the port officials showed the least intention of giving up their leisurely ways.
He set the marines to helping a detail of Negro stevedores handle cargo. Somehow the railroads were put in motion. By the time the distractions and celebrations of the Fourth of July interrupted the labors of his staff at Paris headquarters, the quais of the old port of St. Nazaire were humming with unaccustomed activity and something like twelve thousand troops were on their way in French boxcars (forty men eight horses) to a training area at Gondrecourt in the bleak Burgundian hills north of Chaumont. The smartestlooking detachment that could be found was routed through Paris to be shown to the Parisians on Independence Day.
Although the battalion chosen from the 16th Infantry contained a good many raw recruits, the tall khakiclad Americans in their broadbrimmed campaign hats made a brave show when they paraded through the Court of Honor at the Invalides between ranks of helmeted French troops in horizon blue. General Pershing made a fine appearance. “… the shouts outside and the stirring of the crowd told that the American was approaching,” Harbord wrote in his diary, “and in came Pershing followed by a single aide. He was cheered to the echo. It is too early to say what the General will do in the war … But whatever the future holds for him, General Pershing certainly looks his part since he came here. He is a fine figure of a man: carries himself well, holds himself on every occasion with proper dignity; is easy in manner, knows how to enter a crowded room, and is fast developing into a world figure. He has captured the fickle Paris crowd.”